On Fri, 26 Jan 1996, Chris Wilson (PSD) wrote:
>... The draft says "..., and spaces in font family names
> are replaced with dashes." This makes me as an implementor believe that
> spaces are only allowed when they are translated to dashes, quoted or not
> (i.e., even quoted spaces would be translated to dashes). The examples do
> not quote, either, which makes me not think about using quotes to protect
> spaces within individual family names.
This is probably a bit of X-Windows-centric language that was left in the
draft accidentally. Under X, for example, one would handle "Lucida Sans
Bold" as a reference to the font "lucidasans-bold". Under MS Windows or
MacOS, it would probably be interpreted as the modifier "bold" applied to
the font "Lucida Sans" instead.
I think the syntax for font family names should be consistent with the
rest of CSS (and HTML) grammar in delimiting font names with whitespace
and using quotes (either single or double, if we want to be consistent
with SGML and thus HTML) around all names which contain spaces or other
"special" characters. Single words with no special characters, on the
other hand, should not require quoting, also for consistency with {HT,SG}ML.
Benjamin C. W. Sittler
(my example, including "bold" as it does, is probably not realistic. it
should not be seen as an endorsement for ignoring the usual css method of
font-weight selection. i really used it to show an example of
blank->dash conversion in real-life font names)